Friday, 25 July 2014

The Importance Of Collaboration Fiction

By Sharron Cantu


Most authors do not even consider the possibility of working together with other authors. They see this as being contradictory to being able to express their own vision. However, there are those that have produced collaboration fiction with great success. Where control has been shared successfully, the result can have a richness of many voices and sometimes surpass the efforts of each author working individually.

Academics often have to collaborate with one another in the writing of academic articles and papers. However, it is in the field of fiction where this type of writing as particular challenges. Such a collaboration may be attempted by a writing group as a way of developing the skills of participants and this can help them a great deal. Many collaborations are attempted for commercial purposes too, where experienced authors decide to work with one another.

When working together in this way, as with any other project requiring people to work together, everyone has to relinquish total control. The unique skills and ways in which each individual works have to be taken into account. Each individual has to be open to encouragement as well as criticism. This can only happen if there is mutual respect. If there is a creative synergy between authors, this can speed the process of writing and increase the motivation of each person.

It is often difficult when combining the output of several people to produce a coherent, consistent story. In order to do this, it is important for each individual to have a specific role, know what this is and rely on others to perform their roles too. Each author will often have different talents and recognizing and utilizing this is one of the best ways to produce a good end product. For example, one may push the story forward and another work on developing dialogue and settings.

The division of work is done differently in each case. Some collaborations are looser than others with no plot outline from the beginning and authors contributing randomly, as and when they can. Others are very structured with the basic plot being brainstormed at the beginning and each author knowing exactly what they are responsible for, whether it be developing a certain character or writing specific chapters. Sometimes each author will write sub-plots and they will only be interwoven at the end.

Various problems can arise when a group of authors collaborate on a story. One person may feel that the workload has not been evenly distributed or that his or her suggestions are consistently ignored. Another may want to take over and tell everyone else what to do. A clash of egos can result in disaster.

The world of gaming has resulted in some collaborative writing. This is probably due to the role-playing nature of many of these games where characters constantly interact with one another. Other attempts in collaborative storytelling have been done at online websites where a story is begun and then driven forward by visitors to the site.

When people co-operate with another to produce books, the efforts can be disappointing but they can also be rich and complex. This type of work definitely has a place, especially when accomplished authors succeed in working together. They can produce books that reach greater heights than they could possibly have accomplished on their own.




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